This article is part of the “Year of Experimentation” series, check out the other entries there!

What is Microlearning?

In a very non-scientific way, I see it as:

A way to get lazy people to learn something new, with little effort.

If you want a better more comprehensive explanation you can rely on Wikipedia.

Why Microlearning?

I had the urge of acquiring new knowledge, but the thought of starting a multi-month course in edX, Udemy or Coursera would immediately make me sweat, it felt like too much of a commitment before knowing what I actually wanted to be diving into¹, and as such I never started any.

One day, though, there was an upcoming trip to Italy² and I wanted to learn some basic Italian to be able to communicate, so I downloaded Duolingo and that’s how it all started.

Picking the apps

Contrary to the browsers experiment this didn’t start as a contest to elect the best microlearning app for me, but rather as a way to finally get into learning something which I had always longed for, but had been procrastinating. I had two deficits I wanted to work on: learning Italian and some computer science theory.

There wasn’t too much of a thought process for picking up the apps, I picked up Duolingo for Italian and Brilliant for technical subjects, because these were the names that came to mind³. Upon searching the web I found some potential alternatives to both. For languages, I found out about Pimsleur, Memrise and LingoDeer and for scientific knowledge there is Imprint and Deepstash. I’m mentioning them here as a way to take notes for myself, but also because I would love to hear about the experience anyone had with these.

Using the apps

There is a famous saying in Brazilian schools when a desperate student didn’t do the coursework and looks for help from their fellow nerd⁴, the nerd says:

Copy it, just don’t make it look exactly the same.

It is a simple, yet clever, phrase to explain how to try and fool the teacher that everyone did their own assignment and it fits like a glove for this case, since the apps look uncannily similar:

I can’t say who pioneered this interface and all its quirks. Duolingo started in 2011, while Brilliant was born a year later. More often than not the apps don’t become super famous right off the bat, so they could have come up with a similar interface concurrently, as many inventions have⁵, what I do remember is that Duolingo once sported a very different interface. In any case, let’s dive into how each app works.

Learning

On both apps you start by picking up a course and then following a linear path, as shown on the image above. Every course has bite-sized lessons for you to do and they get progressively more difficult as you complete them, to dive deeper into the subject. I was most of the time using the paid version on them, which allows you to do multiple lessons a day and also eliminate the ads that can be somewhat disruptive.

Duolingo

Duolingo leads you to do different lesson types: it can be a listening/reading activity where you need to fill in the blanks, a practice session to revisit some things you learned in the past or just a session with new content you will be presented to.

There are multiple ways you can input the answer:

• Translating a sentence from one language into another by typing or selecting from predetermined words
• Saying a sentence out loud for the microphone
• Picking from one of a set of options

If you fail, you can see where you did wrong, but you cannot fix it on the spot. Some lesson types will ask you again at the end to check whether you’ve learned from your mistake, some will not.

Brilliant

The Brilliant lessons don’t seem to be as separated by types as Duolingo’s. You’ll only know how you will be assessed when you’re within the course and moving there. As you do, some of the options to answer are:

• Picking one of multiple choices
• Typing out the correct answer
• Running a program to get the answer⁶

If you fail, you are not immediately prompted with the answer, as you would in Duolingo, but rather you can try another one or click to see the solution. Regardless of whether you got it right from the first try or not, you always have a “Why?” button to see a more thorough explanation behind what was the expected response.

Gamification

After you get started, both apps rely heavily on gamification to keep you engaged, such as:

1. Levels: When finishing a set of lessons, they will say you’re now “Level X in subject”, as a small pat on your back⁷.
2. Experience Points (A.K.A XP): You get “XP” as a small reward every time you answer correctly or finish a lesson. This XP is displayed on your profile and can serve as a way for you to measure how far you’ve come and to compare yourself with other people.
3. Leagues: There is a separate counter for the experience you’ve earned in a given week, which will be used to put you on a leaderboard competing against other people for the title of “who learned the most”⁸. If you rank high or low enough, you are promoted or demoted to another division.
4. Streaks: It is not microlearning if you are not doing it a bit every day, so they will keep track of how many consecutive days you’ve been coming back for learning⁹.
5. Notifications: They will ping you a lot during the day both by e-mail and by notifications¹⁰ to remind that you: are about to lose your streak, didn’t do a lesson today yet, will be demoted in the league, etc¹¹.

Duolingo goes a lot farther here on the social: friends quest, friends feed, monthly badges, achievements, followers. There’s something for everyone.

The Verdict

They work, for a while, especially to get you moving and out of a place of comfort¹². As any of the friends or family members that traveled with me to Italy can attest, I was indeed able to sustain some basic to moderately complex conversation/interaction with locals and I only ever learned the language using Duolingo, which states I’m level A2 after finishing Italian (from Portuguese)¹³.

On Brilliant’s side, I can’t tell for sure. I was a lot more eager to do Brilliant lessons than Duolingo’s, averaging 40min a day compared to 15min on Duolingo, but then I was also doing the latter for almost 8 months straight, while the former I did for only one. I finished 5 Brilliant courses, was halfway through the sixth, and was really into some of the learning, like understanding Greediness (in algorithm) or the beginning of Quantum Computing, but I didn’t have any immediate need to apply its knowledge, so its effect was more to get me into a curious state.

On Gamification

Gamification and apps that provide me a lot of data about my habits get me every time. I can’t tell you how many times I was on Duolingo for 5 more min than I wanted to, just to get the “15min a day” challenge, or the number of extra lessons I did to make sure my friend and I wouldn’t fail the “friends quest”.

After finishing a lesson on Duolingo and extending your streak, you are encouraged to remind all the friends on your “friends streak” about the daily lesson and though that sounds helpful and motivating, it meant getting several notifications a day from people at various parts of the day, a bit mental. There were days I did exercises on both of them half-sleeping just because I didn’t want to lose my streak.

On Duolingo

Duolingo deserves credit as I learned some Italian there, it was also truthfully enjoyable even though it is mostly a memorization exercise. Since it doesn’t provide a “Why?” button like Brilliant¹⁴, you’re never really learning grammar, just guessing or trying to reverse engineer it. That being said, I was very satisfied, until I finished the course, then there were two things which were very annoying.

The first was doing the “time challenges”. Every section you have two lessons where you can get from one to three stars depending on whether you are able to “beat” the lesson in less than 90 seconds. I can guess the rationale behind those, something like: “if you can answer fast, you likely learned it”, but it rapidly became a “how can I cut corners to be able to beat the time” considering the app will sometimes fail to listen to my voice, take a while to validate the answer or prompt me with super long sentences that will eat a chunk of my remaining time.

The second is the daily refresher which was just bad, because it repeats lessons you have already done and there were days I was even prompted with the same listening session twice. This was sometimes aggravated by the facts that some lessons were just teaching wrong word translations¹⁵, and though I flagged several, I kept seeing them repeat months on end.

On Brilliant

I was very excited on learning the topics, the graphics used to explain the concepts are gorgeous and the diversity of interactive stuff is legitimately brilliant¹⁶. It is a lot less pushy on you on the gamification side, compared to Duolingo, and the aforementioned “Why?” button to explain the reason for a given answer is extremely useful, as sometimes one might just have not understood it.

That being said, I don’t feel like it can get you through more than the concepts of a given technology, when I tried some more advanced courses like Quantum Computing I increasingly felt the need to guess the answer or to go back and review, it seemed to be doing some leaps in understanding that were hard to follow.

Final Thoughts

It’s a method worth trying, especially if from the very beginning you have enough mental will awareness to get the reins of gamification and accept missing a day or two because you had an exhausting day or feel like doing something else. I can see how spending 20-30 min on Duolingo + 30min on Brilliant daily killed some of my other habits like reading or programming on open source¹⁷, so it demands some sort of control¹⁸.

I recommend you try, with these settings: one app at a time, with all notifications disabled and maybe a timer, that’s how I intend to continue on Duolingo, now that I learned it has extended the Italian course.

Happy microlearning!